The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 265 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 3 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Balaji Srinivasan: Musk's Twitter acquisition liberated Meta and YouTube from censorship
“X-Day was also the liberation of Meta and liberation of YouTube, right? All the countries that these racial fanatics at the NYT had occupied, right? All the networks they had occupied. That was like, you know how, like, the Nazi empire was at, like, its peak, …”
Harari: Corporations and governments will soon understand individuals better than themselves
“What we will see with regard to the individual is that at a certain point, external entities, whether it's corporations or whether it's governments, they will have enough data, especially biometric data, and enough computing power to be able to understand me b…”
Chi: Meta Llama 4 Underperformed on Private Benchmarks Despite Public Scores
“One of the early indications of that you saw was when Meta released Lama four that was a bit of a disaster, and interestingly, what we saw is that on our held out private benchmarks, the model is actually underperforming, but on all of the major public benchma…”
George: Anthropic and OpenAI add more monthly revenue than tech giants
“Anthropic and OpenAI are adding more revenue per month than Meta, Google, or Microsoft.”
Rogers: Previous administration pressured Twitter and Meta to censor posts
“Under the prior administration included things like global engagement center censorship efforts that were the subject of the Murphy Supreme Court litigation, where the State Department Along with other organs of the executive branch would contact Twitter or Me…”
Evans: Zuckerberg's plan to resell excess AI capacity is flawed
“I saw a slightly strange quote from Mark Zuckerberg saying, well, if it turns out that we've over invested, we can just resell the capacity. And I thought, let me just like stop you there, Mark, because if it turns out that you can't use your capacity, everybo…”
Baker: Larry Page said he would risk bankruptcy to win AI race
“Larry Page apparently internally said, I'm happy to go bankrupt rather than lose this race. And I think that is the mentality for sure at Google and perhaps Meta. It's just seen as existential and you have to win.”
Horowitz: Media praised Facebook under Obama, called it dangerous under Trump
“The funny thing was like, if you go back to 2008, All the stories on how Obama got elected were Facebook. Like, he mastered Facebook. He got elected on Facebook. Facebook's the greatest thing. It's making the world more democratic. Arab Spring. Wow, this is so…”
Patel: Microsoft's custom AI silicon lags behind Amazon, Google, and Meta
“Microsoft, their custom silicon kind of sucks but the other three, they're really upping their orders massively over the last year. You know, Amazon is making millions of Tranium. Google's making millions of TPUs. TPUs clearly are like a hundred percent utiliz…”
Srinivasan: Tech platforms replaced government agencies as functional industry regulators
“The actual regulator of taxis is Uber or Lyft because they have real-time tracking. They have star ratings on both sides. Or your you know, some, you know, the FCC or something like who issued licenses. Well, the actual regulator of speech or what have you sai…”
Horowitz: Facebook internal probe found virtually no evidence of Russian hacking
“You know, what they found in terms of the quote-unquote Russian hacking was just about effectively nothing. Like, there was nothing. And so, but the dominant media narrative Was that Facebook had been hacked by the Russians, and I think like probably half the …”
Marc Andreessen: Russian Facebook ad spend during 2016 election was only $80,000
“I think the result of it was, I think it was a result of 80,000 dollars of ad spend by the Russians in, in the relevant period of the election. It was like a total of like a 140,000, but during the actual run of the election, it was 80,000 dollars, and so the …”
Horowitz: a16z top partners outperform executive teams at Meta, Google, and Apple
“If you look at the top people, you know, if you look at Martine Cassato and Chris Dixon and Alex Rampell and David Ulovich and so forth, like that team is better, like IQ wise capability wise than the executive teams of Meta or Google or Apple or any of them.”
Khalaf: Merchants complaining about card interchange fees ignore massive ad tech costs
“So regarding the payment rails, I agree with Zach. It's a yes, but the but is bigger than the yes, because if you look at, ah, all the folks that are honestly complaining about the interchange. Okay, let's talk about it. These are the same people who are payin…”
Andreessen: Media narratives about tech jump directly from useless to evil
“And then basically within like five years, it was like Facebook is like the living demon incarnate on earth and destroying everything. Right? It went from like useless to evil in one step. Right? You know, the headline never gets never just like, oh, this is k…”
Evans: Facebook Has Not Created New User Behavior Since News Feed
“Well, they haven't actually created any new behavior since the newsfeed. What they'done is they bought Instagram, and they bought it very early at what at the time everyone said was a ludicrously high price. At the time, it was, actually, it was a very good pr…”
Levine: Google and Facebook infrastructure is more advanced than AWS
“I think that the Google and Facebook infrastructure is now moving in my opinion, more advanced than what Amazon is. Amazon was created several, many, sort of, already generations ago, relative to this commoditization curve.”
Rampell: Consumer business models degrade as CAC value flows to Google and Facebook
“I mean, Casper got to scale, but lots of CAC, and that's why a lot of these business models, they tend to degrade over time, because all the economic value goes to Google and Facebook.”
Horowitz: Blockchain will be essential infrastructure to verify real content vs AI deepfakes
“Are you gonna trust Google? Are you gonna trust Meta? Are you gonna trust the US government? I think you wanna trust the kind of mathematical game theoretic properties Of the blockchain. So I think that's going to be just a very, very important part of the inf…”
Andreessen: The EU AI Act has largely killed AI development in Europe
“The EU passed this bill called the AI Act, I don't know, whatever, two years ago, and it basically has killed AI development, and, well, it's actually killed AI development in Europe to a large extent and then it even, it is so draconian that even, Even big Am…”
Evans: Claude has virtually no consumer usage despite top benchmark scores
“It's basically, the only consumer, Claude has basically no consumer usage, even though on the benchmark score it's the same. And then it's ChatGPT, and then halfway down the chart, it's Meta and Google.”
Adam D'Angelo: Feed recommendation algorithms are already superhuman at predicting interest
“Recommender systems, the system that ranks your Facebook or Instagram or Quora feed, those recommender systems are already superhuman at predicting what you're gonna be interested in, in reading.”
Rabois: Social graphs are no longer defensible moats for platforms
“Well, I don't think the graph is defensible. I think there are other assets that are. I think the graph has kind of been weakened by, like TikTok has kind of shown that on social products, The graph may, certainly isn't, is not indispensable to success. It may…”
Casado: a16z avoids lesser-known SOTA AI model startups due to heavy subsidies
“So the state-of-the-art model market, this is like the, you know, the Anthropics and the Open AIs it's incredibly competitive, and it's very heavily subsidized, right? I mean, like with Meta and like Google, et cetera, and so kind of our view is, is you have t…”
Dwarkesh: Meta paying $100M for top AI researchers is ROI positive
“If you pay an employee a hundred million dollars and they're a great AI researcher and they make your compute your training or your inference one percent more efficient. Zuck is spending on the order of like eighty billion dollars a year on on compute. That's …”
Bosworth says AI models will become commodities, making open source smart strategy
“I believe these are going to be commodities and you want to commoditize your compliments.”
Bosworth: Meta's Orion prototype proves post-smartphone computing is achievable
“That's why I said like the, Orion was the first thought time I thought Me. Like, the first, Orion, like, putting that in my head, I was like, okay, like, it could happen. Like, there does exist, like, a life for us as a species past the phone.”
Bosworth says augmented reality won't happen automatically without massive capital and effort
“There's a lot of people in tech who are like, yeah, AR will eventually happen. That's not how it fucking works, man. You have to stop And put the money and the time and do it. Like somebody has to stop and do it.”
Immerman: Apple could gain 1 billion search users overnight
“They are not investing the capex like Meta and Google and Microsoft and Amazon, but they control a central node to the consumer, and if they wanted to build a search application, the next day they could have a billion users.”
Wang: Meta's open-source strategy caps value capture at the model layer
“If meta continues open sourcing, that puts a pretty strong cap as to the value that you can get from the model layer.”
Andreessen: Journalist advised Zuckerberg to accept $1B Yahoo acquisition offer
“Facebook got just tons of, you know, it's just like this is the most trivial, stupid, useless, you know, thing that doesn't matter, you know, Facebook, there was almost a deal for Facebook to get bought by Yahoo early on, and I remember a certain very prominen…”
Horowitz: Meta open-sources AI to prevent monopolies, mirroring Google's Android strategy
“The way Meta is thinking about this and the way that they're actually behaving and executing is very similar to how Google thought about Android where, you know, their main concern was that Apple not have a monopoly on the smartphone. You know, not so much tha…”
D'Angelo: Frontier AI model providers will maintain strong profit margins
“And so it's, you know, right now it's OpenAI, Google, maybe Anthropic. Maybe, maybe Meta can be there. Those who can get there, I think it's going to be good business. You'll be able to make a lot of money. You can have good profit margins. You'll have to work…”
Ghodsi: Hype around the largest LLMs mirrors 2000s focus on Cisco
“So I think it's a little bit like right now like that. Who has the largest LLM? Obviously whoever can build the largest one that can train it the most obviously will own all of AI and all the future of humanity. But just like the internet, someone will show up…”
Ghodsi: AI progress would be far behind without Meta releasing Llama
“If the original Llama was never released, What would the state of the world and our view of AI be right now? We would be way further behind, right? And A, it was a big model you know, by what existed in open source and it was open sourced. And both of those th…”
Meta Internal Studies Show In-Office Employees Outperform Native Remote Hires
“Some studies are sort of coming out meta is sort of saying like they've noticed that people are back at the office three days a week are more effective, or if they've already been in the office for a while before they went out on remote versus native remote”
Feifer: Facebook, not the digital camera, ultimately killed Kodak
“What killed Kodak wasn't the digital camera. It was Facebook.”
Hirsch: Healthcare platforms must optimize for outcomes, not time spent
“Remember I came from the world of social. Like I was at Facebook and Yahoo where time spent was like the God metric. It was like, oh my God, we just care about as many eyeballs and as much time as we can. And it could actually, it's less about time spent. It's…”
Dixon: VCs will not fund third-party tools for closed platforms
“You will not see any VC. We have not funded. No one will fund an anti-spam solution for Twitter or Facebook.”
Andreessen: Winning tech companies in 20 years will be 100x larger than Google
“The winning companies, you know, the winning entrepreneurial companies 20 years from now that win are going to be Staggeringly large. Like, they're going to be like, I don't know, 10 or a hundred times the size of Google and Facebook.”
Dixon: Snapchat's growth was severely capped by Facebook cloning its features
“I think it definitely had, I mean, I think it had, like look, look at Snapchat's a great example, right? That was a, I mean, you know they really invented sort of a new media type, right? I mean, that type of, you know, whatever, the vertical short video with …”
Dixon: Centralized platforms inevitably capture all value from third-party developers
“You would never build on top of, you know, a centralized protocol, because people have now learned, after 2030 years of this, that when you do that, that the platform changes the rules, and you ask everyone who built on top of, you know, Twitter, all these dev…”
Wilson: Web2 users deserve financial equity for building platform value
“It's just not right, particularly for a lot of these businesses where the user is the product. Right? Facebook users made Facebook. Twitter users made Twitter. You know, YouTube users made YouTube, right? It's just not right that the people who make the produc…”
Evans: Consumers trust Apple with health data over Google or Facebook
“That kind of piece of strategic positioning has worked out very well for them because you would trust it with this kind of information where you might not trust a product from Google or from Facebook.”
Evans: Machine learning strengthens tech incumbents rather than shifting market power
“Machine learning is like this new foundational technology that, in a sense, will enable a bunch of new stuff and new companies, but it makes Google better Google, and it makes Facebook stronger, Facebook and Amazon maybe stronger Amazon. It doesn't unlock, it …”
Evans: Tech dominance cycle will eventually turn for Big Tech
“It's not apparent how that cycle would turn for Google or Apple or Facebook or Amazon, but it will turn.”